Tessera

Charles C Roseman

@evoroseman.bsky.social

Evolution and genetics of complex traits. Genes, evolution, and society. Masculine pronouns and noun classes in whichever language.

400 Posts1246 Follower 537 Folgt

C. Brandon Ogbunu @cbo.bsky.social · 2d ago

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 "Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity" published in #G3 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) 1/2 The fitness landscape has been among the most influential instruments in evolutionary theory for nearly a century. But we often treat them as fixed and static.

James Holland Jones @juemos.bsky.social · 3d ago

Most-recent common ancestor of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease was about 60,000 years ago, well before there were people in the Americas. I don't think the chipmunks were doing gain-of-function experiments. Figure 3 from Walter et al. (2017): doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Phylogeny (i.e., inferred evolutionary tree) of the spirochete bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

Dated phylogeny of B. burgdorferi in North America. MCC tree of
the best-fitting model inferred with BEAST (relaxed log-normal molecular clock model; Bayesian skyline population size). Tips are coloured by sampling region. Evidence of ancient midwestern ancestry (the oldest internal node in each clade with support for ancestral location in the midwest) is labelled ‘MW’. Branch lengths are in years bp. Blue bars at each interior node represent 95% credible intervals of estimated node age. Branches are labelled with posterior probability values (not shown for shallow nodes for clarity).

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 4d ago

RFK told Dana Bash that Lyme disease “almost certainly” came from gain of function research. Which is utterly false. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 3d ago

> On March 17, 1929, the Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois faced off against the white supremacist historian Lothrop Stoddard. The question under consideration: “Has the Negro the Same Intellectual Possibility as Other Races?” 1/n

The Men Who Believed Some Men Are More Equal Than Others (Gift Article)

In a new book, the historian Kim Phillips-Fein chronicles a “shadow tradition” of anti-egalitarians who fought against America’s founding ideals.

nytimes.com

Luke Knox @lukeknox.me · 5d ago

this is my new favorite diagram

Brachiosaurus projectile vomiting: forces generated and resulting traces
Assuming 50 kg (110 Ibs) of regurgitant, impact velocity from 14 m (45 ft) height, and hard-packed sand as impact site.
h = 14 m (45 ft)
Impact velocity = V = V 2gh = 16.6 m/s; kinetic energy before impact = 6,860 J
Average impact force = 68,600 N

Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 6d ago

A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning. Now out in PNAS, led by the incomparable @apvelilla.bsky.social . We use modeling to explore conditions for the (cultural) evolution of parochial (and anti-parochial) learning biases. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Humans adapt by learning from others, but risk acquiring maladaptive behaviors when learning from individuals facing different conditions. We present an evolutionary model exploring how individuals use social identity markers to select learning targets in diverse populations. Learners evolve biases that track reliable information sources: preferring similar individuals when in-group knowledge is adaptive, and dissimilar individuals when in-group behaviors are disadvantageous. Our framework demonstrates that this adaptive bias makes social learning viable even when it is costlier than individual learning. Additionally, we show that a minimum threshold of reliable cultural information is required for social learning to spread, providing a mathematical explanation for how demographic diversity drives population-level patterns of cultural segregation and assimilation.

Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2w ago

As good as many of you said. I really appreciate the unambiguous point that this primarily a racist moral panic before unpacking the nuanced second-order explanations. dannykatch.substack.com/p/we-used-to...

We used to be able to buy things in this country

Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy

dannykatch.substack.com

Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 2w ago

God keep me from ever completing anything.

Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · 2w ago

Further analysis of Packalen & Bhattacharya article, where they claimed #NIH-funded research was slow to pick up on new ideas. I argue that their approach is flawed, and I present an analysis that shows the exact opposite. pubpeer.com/publications...

PubPeer - NIH funding and the pursuit of edge science

There are comments on PubPeer for publication: NIH funding and the pursuit of edge science (2020)

pubpeer.com

Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 2w ago

Werner Herzog

Nanoraptor@nanoraptor.danamania.com · 2w ago

You suddenly get a narrator describing your life and there’s no way to turn it off - everyone can hear it. While shopping, at work, at home, with friends - the voice narrating your every move goes on. Who do you hope is the voice of this narrator?

Adam Rutherford @adamrutherford.bsky.social · 3w ago

I've signed and sent a letter - from authors, broadcasters, journalists, artists, scholars and performers - to express our deep concern at @exeter.ac.uk’s troubling plans to make mass redundancies within the Humanities Dept @uniofexeterhass.bsky.social. I would love it if you read and shared widely.

Dear Vice Chancellor, Provost, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean for the Faculty of Humanities,
Arts and Social Sciences and Chair of Council (cc Director of Human Resources and Chief Financial
Officer)
We write, as authors, broadcasters, journalists, artists, publishers, academics and performers in the public
sphere, to express our deep concern at the University of Exeter’s plans to make redundancies within the
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS). The cuts come at a point when Exeter is not in
deficit, and they are not distributed equally across the university. With 114 of the proposed 153 FTE
academic redundancies falling within HASS, the University is dismantling areas of established excellence
and international renown in a Russell Group University whose reputation is known to be outstanding in the
Humanities. Several of the disciplines subject to the proposed cuts, including Classics and Ancient History,
English and Creative Writing, History, and Theology and Religion are among the UK’s strongest according
to league tables, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF),
and other recognised indicators, including QS World Rankings.
The extent of the proposed cuts is both shocking and misguided. Exeter is seeking to make up to 20
academics redundant in English and Creative Writing, out of a headcount of 62. In Languages and Visual
Culture upwards of 17 colleagues will be made redundant, decimating subjects including Art History and
Visual Culture, French, German, Italian, Hispanic Studies, Russian and Chinese. 5 posts will go or have
gone in Classics and Ancient History (2 academics have already left), out of a staff body of 20. In Theology
and Religion up to 5 academics will be made redundant out of a group of 13. In History over 17 colleagues
will be made redundant, out of a staff body of 53. In the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies staff are
facing a headcount reduction of almost a third (6FTE out …

Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 3w ago

And the reign of error continues...

An email to the editors of Journal of Controversial Ideas reading:

Journal of Controversial Ideas recently published an article by a pseudonymous author, Shuichi Tezuka, entitled "The Equality Paradox" (Tezuka, S. The Equality Paradox. Controversial Ideas 2026, 6, 1; doi:10.63466/jci06010001). There are at least two issues with it that require prompt editorial attention.

Tezuka (2026) references a symposium held at the 2024 meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists as:

Roseman, C. (2024b, March 22). Symposium: Undermining the production of race science. 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

The symposium was co-organized, and the attribution should read "Jones, JH & Roseman, C" to acknowledge the essential contributions made by my colleague Prof. James Holland Jones (copied here).

Moreover, on page 4 of their paper, Tezuka (2026) misattributes a quote. The offending quote is in the following sentence of Tezuka (2026. p.4):

The symposium’s stated goal was to “form the basis for a comprehensive and in-depth guide that will aid scholars of human evolution in writing effective reviews to make it more difficult for race science to get into the literature and to improve our own scholarship when it comes to issues at the intersection of race and biology” (Roseman, 2024a).

The quote is not from Roseman (2024a), which is the abstract for one of the talks in the symposium. It is from what should be cited as Jones & Roseman (2024, as noted above), which is the description of the symposium.

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 4w ago

Only in the Journal of Controversial ideas can a symposium that was full of talks quantitatively refuting race science claims and a paper about how race science fails basic standards of evolutionary biology be framed primarily as moral judgements and censorship.

In March 2024, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists held a symposium titled “Undermining the production of race science.” The symposium’s stated goal was to “form the basis for a comprehensive and in-depth guide that will aid scholars of human evolution in writing effective reviews to make it more difficult for race science to get into the literature and to improve our own scholarship when it comes to issues at the intersection of race and biology” (Roseman, 2024a). Kevin Bird, one of the symposium’s participants, argued in a paper published in American Psychologist that race research is socially harmful because of “its use by racial extremists, sometimes directly assisted by psychologists, to influence social policies regarding immigration, social welfare, criminal justice, and diversity and to preserve the racialized structure of society” (Bird et al., 2024).
Another goal of the AABA symposium was “Developing concrete changes to mainstream evolutionary theory and method that make it more difficult for race scientists to use mainstream scholarship in their work” (Roseman, 2024b). Several of the symposium’s presentations made specific proposals about how evolutionary biology should be modified to prevent race research from making use of its findings, described as “reforming our own sciences so that we no longer give it support” (Roseman, 2024a) or “how we can shift methodological norms towards ones that do not as easily play into the premise of race science” (Athreya et al., 2024). The rejection of otherwise mainstream ideas in biology, due entirely to their potential to support race research, is an example of what Shuichi Tezuka (2021) describes as a “domino effect” that tends to occur when a hypothesis is rejected on religious or political grounds. Or as Tezuka (2022) put it: moral judgments about science cannot remain confined to a single idea for long.

Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · last mo.

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

Children as agents of cultural adaptation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49

cambridge.org

Elena Miu @elenamiu.bsky.social · last mo.

We (with @felixthehauskat.bsky.social and @mathildevm.bsky.social) contributed a commentary on this fantastic paper highlighting the need to consider childhood in models of cultural evolution: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Peer cultures in long-term cultural evolution | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Peer cultures in long-term cultural evolution - Volume 49

cambridge.org

Dorsa Amir@dorsaamir.bsky.social · last mo.

Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · last mo.

First: Philadelphia legends the Forten family, icons. Second: His granddaughter, the abolitionist and education rights activist Charlotte is in my book! She was a trusted friend of Robert Gould Shaw who you’ll recall as the Union officer who agreed to command the 1st all-black regiment.

Christina Proenza-Coles@proenzacoles.bsky.social · last mo.

James Forten heard the 1st public reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776; he participated in the American Revolution & fought for its ideals long after the war. A skilled entrepreneur & ardent abolitionist, his wife & daughters founded the 1st interracial antislavery society for women.

Phila M. Msimang @msimang.bsky.social · last mo.

Next week I will have the pleasure of presenting my work on the intersection of race, politics, and international relations at Rhodes University’s Department of Political and International Studies in their Teach-In Series of 2026. See more about the Teach-In Series here: lnkd.in/dT4qcWdt

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · last mo.

The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has reached a $1.9 million settlement with a former professor who was fired after she criticized Charlie Kirk.

University of Tennessee to pay $1.9M to professor fired over Charlie Kirk comment

The cultural anthropology assistant professor will not return to the University of Tennessee faculty.

knoxnews.com

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · last mo.

As philosophy rushes to claim expertise on AI, AI companies rush to control the philosophical narrative. Unlike other disciplines, philosophy has no standards for reporting conflicts of interest. This petition endeavors to change that: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Open Letter about Industry Funding and Disclosure in Philosophy

*For full list of signatories, updated every few hours, please click here.* In recent years, philosophical writing on areas such as climate change, technology, misinformation, and artificial intellige...

docs.google.com

Genevieve Housman @gahousman.bsky.social · last mo.

The Skeletal Genomics Group is at #SMBE2026 this year, and we have lots of science we are presenting today!

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · last mo.

Excellent post explaining why it’s not possible to breed criminality out of human populations, a claim beloved of eugenicists. Did not realise the source of this particular claim 👇 was a paper published in Evolutionary Psychology

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · last mo.

Twitter is going kind of crazy about crime and genetics right now (What's new?). My next post is a deep dive into a paper behind a widespread claim that brutal execution in Medieval Europe selected for reduced aggression, allowing civilization to develop. The title says it all, really.

Alan Rogers @alanrogers.bsky.social · last mo.

The Frost/Harpending article was published in spite of at least one negative review--mine. I initially declined the review request, because Henry H was my thesis advisor. But the editor wanted my views anyway. My review was similar to Kevin's. No idea why the editor decided to publish anyway.

Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · last mo.

This is an important intervention. It is also a demonstration of a major weakness of eugenics and race science & eugenics (race science etc.): They sound evolutionary without doing the evolution. Attacking race science etc. on this front as @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social does is vital.1/7

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · last mo.

Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · last mo.

Capital punishment is not a breeding program

No, medieval execution didn't "genetically pacify" Europe

sequencesandconsequences.substack.com

ceej @ceej.online · last mo.

For fifty years, fans, critics, and scholars have debated the meaning of the Eagles’ acclaimed 1976 recording “Hotel California.” Our new paper uses advanced AI analysis to finally reveal the hidden truth: it’s about what if there was a spooky hotel

Paige Madison @fossilhistory.bsky.social · last mo.

A few words from archaeologist Jamie Hodgkins on the latest H. naledi paper, which is cool and impressive overall (congrats to the proteomics team on this) but risks being overshadowed by claims from some team members that are a reach. 1/2

The latest proteomic paper on H naledi is fascinating, and frankly not surprising. The tooth morphology has long indicated that this was a population with exceptionally low variation, so the proteomic results are consistent with that pattern. The paper itself is strong. As with all science, future amelogenin‑based studies will determine whether this method can reliably determine biological sex with high confidence in older contexts, and different species. Personally, I think the paper is cool, and congratulations to Dr. Madupe.
What is frustrating is that this finding, like everything associated with H. naledi, is immediately folded back into the burial claim. The defenses of the H. naledi burial claim always circle back to the same two talking points:
1) that "experts" don't think a small‑brained hominin could possibly bury its dead, and
2) that "experts" don't think that H. naledi had “culture.”
I find both points puzzling. The small brain size of H. naledi has not been a major concern for most researchers or reviewers; the only people emphasizing it are the project directors who emphasized the point in their Netflix show. There is no known brain‑size threshold required for mortuary behavior, or for most behaviors, for that matter. Non‑human animals have been observed covering and attending to their dead.
The “culture” argument is equally confusing. If culture is defined as a system of shared, learned, socially transmitted behaviors, knowledge, and practices that shape how a group interacts with the world, then I am not aware of anyone in paleoanthropology who doubts that all hominins had culture in some form. We know that different chimpanzee communities have distinct behavioral repertoires and tool‑use patterns. Ravens, crows, bowerbirds, capuchins, macaques, and baboons all exhibit group‑specific behaviors: culture by any reasonable definition.
Importantly, as I have discussed before baboons, chimpanzees, and bears use caves as birthing dens...

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 2mo ago

I wrote a very short piece on models & modelling in part because we need to protect our scientific praxis damage caused by AI in terms of addictive frictionless thinking, esp since it harms society broadly too. "Models" doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Thanks @carvalhais.org for inviting me to write this.

Models in cognitive and related sciences are part of an overarching methodology, computational
or broadly formal modelling, that aims to test, refine, and showcase our understandings of
brain, cognition, and behaviour.1 In their foundational book Models as Mediators, Mary S.
Morgan and Margaret Morrison (1999)2 make the case that models play a mediatory role in
science between what we observe and what we want to build to house our understandings,
theories. Under this conception of models, known as the pragmatic view,3 we can carve out
not only their unique role, but also why and how they must be protected from forces that
do not prize understanding. Taking a broad perspective that sees all human activity that
strives towards understanding as scientific or as under our purview as modellers, allows for
this characterisation of models as mediators to be more generally fruitful.4 In the context of
human-centred design, for example, our theories may be anything from our understanding of
users’ behaviours in a specific context to our understanding of what a user expects from a
product or system a priori.
Importantly, scientific modelling is apart from other scientific praxis, such as concocting
a verbal or formal theory or designing and running experiments.5 Models, as described by
Morrison and Morgan,6 have the following characteristics:
a. construction — models are neither directly derived from theory nor from data, but
through an effortful friction between the modeller and the medium (e.g. their favourite
programming language, mathematics, natural language) through which they are building
their model;7

In the contemporary entanglements with industry that scholarly fields find themselves —
such as with the imposition of gargantuan statistical models, which consume breathtaking
amounts of energy, and which require the building of evermore data-centres to house the glut of
data unavoidably required for their so-called human-like abilities9 — the idea of using models
in such slow10 ways is seemingly out the window. What is worthy of perseverating on in our
specific context is not so much that so-called artificial intelligence (AI) models may harm our
individual practice or displace our labour. They certainly may.11 However, the threat from AI
worthy of highlighting here is that a culture of frictionless practice, which such models (in
name only) promote, is not only harmful to people’s mental health and skils, but also directly
undermines scholarly praxis.12
Avoiding the effortful and difficult process of building, testing, and throwing away models
— be they written in well-crafted code, be they not-yet-fully-formal models, or be they mock-ups
of potential final products — with the goal of deeply understanding our theories about the world
is anti-scientific and anti-scholarly. This spills over into an anti-intellectual stance for a designer
or user of models. Such avoidance is normalised by the addictive convenience culture facilitated
and entrenched by contemporary AI. A culture in which so-called prompting a machine for a
seemingly polished output requires none of the above characteristics of modelling as a process.
Furthermore, presenting anti- or non-scientific modelling endeavours as something other than
what they are, may even veer into pseudo-science and pseudo-technology.13 To add insult
to injury, if junior modellers are not trained to perform this praxis, the end of skills being
inherited by future generations is nigh.
To subvert this, we must preserve the special status of crafting models. I propose this
can be done in a two-pronged manoeuvre: a) rejection …

quantitative predictions of the tides, which have been being refined over the millennia,24 to the
qualitative shift in explanation produced by carving out the concept of gravity. Quantitative
predictions did not pile up to produce our contemporary understanding of gravity.
Protecting modelling praxis may be difficult, but needs must when the devil drives. The
alternative is stifling our knowledge about (our understandings of) the world. And so to
avoid making theorising and modelling seem superfluous, we must remember that scientific
models do not operate like inferential statistical models wherein prediction is the goal. As
expounded on above, models are the instrument through which we perform fully-fledged
scientific reasoning on our theories, and which mediate between theory, formal or otherwise,
connecting it to observations, data, and phenomena, and back again. A model (in name only)
that is built through applying statistics over a dataset, which all contemporary artificial neural
network-based AI models are, will neither function as mediator between data and theory —
it has been contaminated — nor provide qualitative predictions.25 Nor will it serve any user
who seeks to gain insight and skills, nor any designer of systems who wishes for a society
comprising such fellow humans.
Ultimately, “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of
things directly coincided.”26 If we merge essences and appearances in our reasoning, we risk
our understandings of the world. All modelling, all metaphorical, theoretical, and mediatory
thinking, enrich us and our societies and make possible not only valuable understandings of
our own humanity, but constitute our humanity as such

kate bush’s husband @airbagged.bsky.social · 2mo ago

He hasn’t tweeted today what happened

Charlie Kirk & C
@charliekirk11
X.com
Juneteenth should not be a federal holiday.

Barry Butler Photography @barrybutler9.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Today is Juneteenth, Chicago

Ken Tremendous @kentremendous.bsky.social · 2mo ago

There is exactly one good story coming out of the Boston sports scene right now and it's that the Scottish fans are drinking the town dry and playing bagpipes everywhere and just generally being delightful

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 2mo ago

And that if we are concerned about artificial entities becoming autonomous and behaving in ways that are not aligned with our values, they already exist: corporations

Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Lots of nervous Brazilians here at the airport...